Hello, this is London rising

摘要

I've always held a fascination for maps; from my first days exploring the GeoDjango project, to writing clustering systems and map Tenderers, to my experiments in indoor 3D mapping. Thus, when I finally gave in and bought a 3D printer at the start of this year (a SeeMeCNC Rostock MAX v2 - it is fantastic, and I had a lot of fun building it from the kit), I'd had a rough project in mind for a while, to 3D print maps with actual vertical relief. Initially, I had been looking at large-scale terrain - in the style of the old raised-relief poster maps - but then a story about the UK's ongoing Open Data initiative prompted me to log on to data.gov.uk and poke around a bit. Browsing the geographic data revealed a set of LiDAR data collected by the Environment Agency; it didn't cover the whole country, or even the whole of London, but it did manage to cover a good size slice of central London along the river, including two of the places I've lived there. Armed with a fresh objective to make a 3D map of my hometown, and hang it on my wall here in San Francisco, I downloaded the LiDAR data and started poking around.